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Some New Weaknesses in the RC4 Stream Cipher

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Information Security Applications (WISA 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8267))

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Abstract

In FSE 2011, Maitra and Paul observed that there exists negative bias in the first byte of the RC4 keystream towards 0. In this paper, we give our theoretical proof of this bias. This bias immediately provide distinguisher for RC4, and ciphertext only attack on broadcast RC4. Additionally, we discover some new weaknesses of the keystream bytes even after the first \(N\) rounds of the PRGA, where \(N\) is the size of the RC4 permutation, generally, \(N=256\). The weaknesses in turn provide us with certain state information from the keystream bytes no matter how many initial bytes are thrown away.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All the operation \('+'\) and \('-'\) applying to the algorithm of RC4 are modular by N, and the notation \(s_t[t_1]\) means \(s_t[t_1 mod N]\).

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the National Basic Research 973 Program of China under Grant NO.2013CB338002. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Trusted Computing and Information Assurance, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190, Beijing, China

    Jing Lv & Bin Zhang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Dongdai Lin

Authors
  1. Jing Lv
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  2. Bin Zhang
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  3. Dongdai Lin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jing Lv .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. KAIST, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    Yongdae Kim

  2. Korea University, Seoul, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    Heejo Lee

  3. CyLab Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Adrian Perrig

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Lv, J., Zhang, B., Lin, D. (2014). Some New Weaknesses in the RC4 Stream Cipher. In: Kim, Y., Lee, H., Perrig, A. (eds) Information Security Applications. WISA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8267. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05149-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05149-9_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05148-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05149-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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